I. Technical Field
The present invention relates to data processing and, more particularly, systems and methods for testing an infrastructure.
II. Background
There is, and will continue to be, advances and changes in how enterprises conduct business. Whether these advances and changes occur through growing competition, globalization, mergers, acquisition, or a restructure of business processes, a key to success will be how quickly the enterprise's information technology (IT) organization can adapt to evolving business needs. Adapting to these needs presents challenges to the business enterprise.
One such challenge is the development and deployment of software applications used in connection with the business enterprise. These business applications are often developed and deployed by the business enterprise to support operations, improve internal and external business processes, and to allow customers and suppliers to conduct business with the business enterprise. The business applications may interact with hardware and software distributed across an intranet and the Internet. As such, the infrastructure (or framework) associated with a business application may include hardware and software across an intranet or the Internet. When developing a business application, the infrastructure of the business application should be tested before installation of the business application to facilitate timely and reliable deployment of the application. By way of example, a purchasing application at a computer may require access through the Internet to another computer hosting a database application for providing price information. The same purchasing application may also require access through an intranet to another computer hosting an internal accounting database application and other internal applications. The infrastructure of the purchasing application may thus include the hardware and software associated with the purchasing application as well as other applications. For example, the infrastructure may include computers, their operating systems, and the networks connecting the computers, network devices (e.g., routers, firewalls, and the like), web servers, and database applications. In this example, although development of the purchasing application is complex, testing of the infrastructure of the purchasing application is also complex since it may require testing numerous disparate applications, databases, network connections, and the like, some of which may not be under the control of the business enterprise. Moreover, the testing of the infrastructure associated with the application is often unique to the application and performed manually—making it prone to error and time consuming. Furthermore, once infrastructure testing of the application is complete, another application may also require infrastructure testing—prompting additional manual testing unique to the other application. There is thus a need to improve testing of an infrastructure associated with an application, such as a business application, being developed and deployed.